07/07/2017 Newswatch

Now it's time for Newswatch, with Samira Ahmed.

This week, could virtual reality be the future of news?

Hello and welcome to Newswatch. BBC news through a virtual reality

headset. Will audiences take a experiencing news events this way?

And what questions to the new technologies pose for journalists?

First, though, Saffi Roussos was one of 22 people killed at a pop concert

in Manchester on 22nd of May. She would have been nine on Thursday.

Judith Mauritz spoke to her parents. I just wanted to celebrate the

birthday of Saffi through doing this. What has your family lost? We

have lost everything. We have, because we will just never be the

same. Stephanie and Trevor Firth were a number of viewers picking on

one aspect of that interview, saying...

Versions of the report ran on BBC News all day, leading the news at

6pm. It provided powerful and moving television but some people had

concerns about the prominence given to the item. Here is Mark Eden....

Linda Dell also contacted us about the coverage, leaving as this

telephone message. I found it to be mawkish in the extreme to show the

video clip of the people outside the concert hall. Surely the BBC can

find better news than this and finding these people in anguish to

put them on screen. I am fed up with it. The BBC director General Lord

Hall announced the corporation's annual plan this week, and he

addressed what he called a huge competition presented online by

companies such as Amazon and Netflix. He proposed the development

of virtual reality content in the news and current affairs. There has

been some work in this area, including We Wrote, which dramatises

the journey to Europe of a Syrian family on smuggler bows. -- boats.

The film was animated by the makers of Wallace and Gromit and it won an

industry award this week. It may not be news as we know it, but could it

be the future? Virtual reality footage like that is only properly

experienced wearing a headset, but a simpler version, 360 degrees video,

can be viewed online and on mobiles. The first such attack was aired

following the terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2000 15. This is

what it is like in today, this is the Place de la Republique. The

attention was to create an immersive style of reporting which puts the

viewer at the heart of the story. But what questions to these new

technologies raise for the BBC, and could they revolutionise the way

that audiences receive news? I am joined by the newly appointed head

of the BBC virtual reality hub. Can you explain the difference between

VR and 360? If you watch it through a virtual reality headset, the

footage, when you look around, it feels like you're there. It is much

more immersive. But true VR is made from computer graphics and fix your

head into thinking that you are someone else. There is a giant pit

that it up there you and your heart might start beating faster and you

would get that fear of being in a real situation you are scared. We

have seen 360 degrees footage of the Large Hadron Collider. You get a

sense of its scale. It is more than just watching standard news footage.

VR is different. We have got that headset. You've got a film that has

been made for BBC News on it. This is a film we made to show you what

it was likely be a firefighter. This was a fireman that rescued six

children from a house fire on Christmas Day, 2012. The phone is

slotted into the front of their headset which is playing it. Get

started. Straightaway, it is in someone's room, and you're watching

how the fire starts. It is amazing. It does feel like you're in the room

with this fire officer talking to you, from his station, and

explaining the background to this incident, that he had to tackle. It

is just the scale of it. You feel like it is my size. It is very

different to watching something on a flat screen. -- life-size. If it

works well on a flat screen, it is not virtual reality. Obviously Yu

Hanchao -- choices about which stories get that treatment. How do

you decide what might be a story for VR or 360, or the benefit of telling

it that way? The benefit allows the audience to step inside story, so

that they see it as you would, if you were a reporter. For example for

a foreign reporter to stand in a place and allow the audience to look

around and see, and almost smell and feel the sites of the place you're

standing in. It offers amazing opportunities. With a firefighter

one, it enables you to be there with someone, see how they do their job

and being with them. It is be there, or be them. Is there at different

audience, one that does not watch bulletins and just watches things on

the website? Were at the stage now where we have not worked out,

really, how you would deliver this regularly to an audience. It is

still highly experimental. We are starting to understand the stories

that benefit from it. It is early days. The BBC has developed content

for mobile phones, when they were to deliver news but only 2 million

people have VR headsets and the BBC is spending lots of money developing

stuff for them. Is that smart money at this stage? We're not spending a

lot of money, we are investigating it and seeing what audience benefits

we can achieve through it. There would be no point in the BBC

spending lots of money until there is an audience for it. But it is a

chicken and egg thing. If we can find extraordinary ways to tell

stories using VR that allows people to step in, and understand the world

in completely new ways, that is completely justifiable. That film

about the refugee experience, which has won awards, I wonder how many

ordinary people have actually seen it. They work, yet, but eventually

more people will be able to. That was a very early prototype, to see

whether you could, through virtual reality, put people in a place where

they would see what it was like to be refugees, trying to travel across

the Mediterranean in the boat with them, feeling the splashes of the

waves, passing by the boat, and feeling the terror as they try to

cross the sea. That is what it was trying to achieve. That was a

reconstruction based report. If you are filming in 360, you get privacy

issues and whether distressing images might be caught up. You have

control of what you might be filming. Absolutely. There will be

lots of things we have to address as this technology develops. They are

not much different from a reporter filming something on a mobile phone,

it is just that it is all very round, and you might be filming

things that you don't even see as you film them and you are in the

spotlight when you're editing them. In the rush to give an immersive

experience, which is what lots of social media does, things like

periscope, is the BBC throwing away the editorial decision-making that

distinguishes BBC news? Most foreign reporters get excited about VR

because one of the missions of the BBC in the end is to help people

understand what is going on in the world. And so, if you go back to

those presuppose what we are all about, and work out how VR or 360

enables you to achieve those, I don't think those issues will be so

difficult. Finally, while we are looking to the future, the better

Stephen Hawking was taking the long view on Sunday when he spoke to us

at head of a conference to mark his 75th birthday. In an exclusive

interview with BBC News, Professor Hawking told me he was worried about

the future of our species. What is your view on President Trump's

decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, and what impact

do you think that will have on the future of the planet? We're getting

the point where warming becomes irreversible. Trump's actions could

boost the Earth over a bridge with as becoming the plan of Venus with a

temperature of 250 degrees, and it's raining sulphuric acid. The decision

to run that at the end of the bulletin on Sunday at Robert

McCartney. He rang us to say why. Stephen Hawking, one of the greatest

physicists of all time, gave an interview to the BBC in which he

virtually said, the end of the world is nigh, because we're close to the

tipping point at which global warming, we won't be able to stop it

and we could end up becoming another Venus. And you put it as a minor

item at the end of the news. Things are grim. You know, you're treating

it as a minor item on the news! Thank you for all your comments this

week. If you want to share your comments on BBC News and current

affairs or appear on the programme, you can get in touch with those...

-- with us. And if you ever miss an edition of

the programme you can catch up with it on the BBC iPlayer or through our

website. That's all from us. We'll be back to hear your thoughts about

BBC News coverage again in the next week. Goodbye.